Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, which owns the Daily
Mail, attacks David Cameron for "political expediency" in the wake of the
phone hacking scandal during a staunch defence of the PCC and
self-regulation of the press

11:01PM BST 12 Oct 2011

Speaking at a public seminar staged for the Leveson Inquiry, Mr Dacre “unequivocally” condemned phone hacking as a “disgrace” but asked that the response to it be kept in proportion. He said the inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, had more powers than those held to investigate the Iraq war.

He said: “Am I alone in detecting the rank smell of hypocrisy and revenge in the political class’s current moral indignation over a British press that dared to expose their greed and corruption – the same political class, incidentally, that, until a few weeks ago, had spent years indulging in sickening genuflection to the Murdoch press.”

He went on: “Self-regulation, I would argue, is at the very heart of a free press.

“Which is why I profoundly regret that a Prime Minister, who had become too close to News International in general and Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade [the company’s former chief executive] in particular, in a pretty cynical act of political expediency has prejudiced the outcome of this inquiry by declaring that the PCC [Press Complaints Commission], an institution he’d been committed to only a few weeks previously, was a 'failed’ body.”

Mr Dacre said it was “emphatically not” and that self-regulation was the “only viable way of policing a genuinely free press”.